The workshop took place in Leeds, July 12th-14th, 1993 bringing together
over 40 participants from around the world, including UK, USA, Canada, Spain
and Israel. The theme of the conference was the study of shape and its
applications
in 2D and 3D imaging, with keynote speakers Prof. M. Miller of Washington
University,
St. Louis, USA and Prof. J. Kittler, University of Surrey, UK.

The participants were from a broad range of backgrounds
and the content included a blend of theory and application.
The range of applications was wide, and included
recognition of biological shapes such as mitochondria and amoebae;
modelling heart ventricles and prostate glands in medical imaging; recognition
of
handwritten postcodes and human faces; computer animation and
computer aided design; testing for shape differences in skulls of monkeys;
segmentation of human wrist X-rays; modelling movement of pigs in a pen;
line detection in industrial inspection; the use of cross ratios for object
recognition;
fusing nuclear medicine and MR images; automatic classification
of human chromosomes; and fusing two views using object motion.

Prof. Michael Miller opened the conference in animated style with a lecture
entitled `Mitochondria, membranes, amoebae, neuroanatomies,
track targets: studies in 1, 2, 3-D shape'. The main contents of the talk
included global shape models, group transformations and distributions
for Bayesian analysis. The primary focus was the mitochondria
example, where the images contained cell-like blobs viewed under an electron
micrograph
in 2D. The approach involves the use of pattern theory for
representing knowledge in complex systems - the subject of a recent read
paper to the Royal Statistical Society by Grenander and Miller.
His second talk involved a deep discussion of the jump-diffusions
that are used for inference in complex scenes, where the number of objects
in the scene is not known.

Prof. Kittler spoke about parametric shape detection
based on statistical hypothesis testing and in particular the
relationship with the Hough transform.
There were 12 other interesting talks over the three days ranging from
statistical shape analysis to the computer vision and engineering approaches
to object recognition. Posters were also presented and discussed during
coffee breaks.

The final morning session was sponsored by the COMIR (Centre
of Medical Imaging Research, University of Leeds). Profs. Smith
(Medical Physics), Mardia (Statistics), Kent (Statistics) and Hogg (Computer
Studies)
gave a wide programme of talks, with applications in medical imaging and
computer vision.
The conference was concluded with a practical session on a cluster of Silicon
Graphics
workstations, conducted by Prof. Colin Goodall (Penn State University). The
competitive
task involved identifying objects by using cross ratios, with Dr. Tim Cootes
(Manchester)
being awarded the prize.

This is the second year that the workshop has operated in this conference format
at the
impressive facilities of Fairbairn House, Leeds. The active participation of
invited
and contributing speakers has proved to be very fruitful.

On the leisure side a conference dinner was arranged
for the first time this year. With after-dinner
anecdotes from Mike Smith this proved to be enjoyable and successful.
Success was also had by a group of conference participants, `chaired' by Michael
Miller
- we won the local pub quiz!